General What does your up port look like?

[WhiteSpider]

I was thinking of drawing deck plans for an orbital Star Port. And while considering what facilities to add, I wondered what the structure should look like, dispersed structure, cylindrical, mushroom shaped (like Star Trek), Big and Blocky (Babilon 5).
What do the stations look like in your Universe?

WhiteSpider

 

[kilemall]

IMTU artificial gravity is a relative thing, so pre grav stations are ring with a spin and heavier ships dock at the center shaft so as not to induce unbalanced wobbling. Something like Expanse Tycho Station.

Maybe tethered asteroids in the belt with induced spin, docking in the center rock.

Modern stations would be bigger with a tendency towards tubes for smaller or flattened spheres for larger. Distributed open structure for rapid trans load or shipyard facilities if armor isn’t a factor.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Big and Blocky (Babilon 5).

In the absence of artificial gravity, the "rotating cylinder" with immobilized zero acceleration "spine" makes far too much sense for true megastructure space stations.

 

[Rupert]

IMTU up-ports vary enormously. As they age they tend to grow, and it's generally not in a way that follows any grand long-term plan. Thus big old stations will tend to look like an asymmetrical assemblage of random starship construction parts.

Newer ones look more orderly. It's fairly common for lower TL worlds to use 'planetoid hulls'. As they often use a rock that's much bigger than they initially need, these can absorb considerable growth before they need to start growing random growths externally, though docking towers and shipyards for major ships will tend to appear stuck on apparently random parts of the rock over time.

There will be exceptions, of course. These will be either nice new stations, or ones owned by an entity that's good at making and sticking to long-term plans (a megacorp or perhaps the Imperial Navy). I would expect most to have a base form that's both inexpensive and that has a large surface area, because a great deal of an up post's utility is in dealing with spaceships and that means docks and cargo bay and access to them, and so on. Ease of maintenance and of managing traffic control works against things like dispersed or close structures, with their many small parts and odd angles, etc. Therefore such well-designed and managed up-ports will tend to be boxes or cylinders. Low TL worlds with questionable artificial gravity might used spun wheels, but gravitics are so common that this would be rare.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Watching. More to come, but basically this thread:

Thread 'Brainstorming Boughene/Regina (SM 1904)'

Dec 8, 2021

This thread is just a spot to gather my thoughts (and whatever input anyone wishes to contribute) about Boughene Station.
I'll probably consolidate it all into a parallel IMTU-annotated version of the Wiki entry at some point, as I did for Collace/District 268.

Boughene/Regina (SM 1904) (trav wiki entry)
A8B3531-D
First: According to wiki, the planet's UWP is irrelevant since almost all of the 600,000 residents live on a space station in orbit around it. That's a pretty big space station (approximately 3 million Td). This space station is at least 200 years old.

Second...

• Grav_Moped
• Replies: 107
• Forum: Imperial Interstellar Scout Service

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[Condottiere]

I'd suburbanize it, by adding additional spacestations that specialize in specific roles, rather than expanding beyond a certain tonnage.

 

[Spinward Scout]

I was thinking of drawing deck plans for an orbital Star Port. And while considering what facilities to add, I wondered what the structure should look like, dispersed structure, cylindrical, mushroom shaped (like Star Trek), Big and Blocky (Babilon 5).
What do the stations look like in your Universe?

WhiteSpider

Do a Google search or Pinterest search for: orbital Star Port deck plans Traveller rpg

On the Google search, you have to click IMAGES.